Birmingham

Birmingham is the second-most populous city in the United Kingdom after London, the most populous city in the English Midlands, and the administrative center of West Midlands. It was established in the 500s by the Angles, who named it for the Beormingas tribe. By 1086, it was the poorest and least populous town in Warwickshire, but it started to develop as a commercial and urban center in 1166. It was founded as a planned market town and seigneurial borough, and it developed into a prosperous urban center of merchants and craftsmen. By 1327, it was the third-largest town in Warwickshire, remaining so for the next 200 years. It grew in the Industrial Revolution, which saw Birmingham become the first manufacturing town in the world in 1791. Thousands of small workshops were established, and the Watt steam engine was invented in Birmingham. As a working-class and industrial city, it was a center of the radical movement which led to the Great Reform Act of 1832. It suffered heavy bomb damage during "The Blitz" in World War II, and it underwend extensive urban regeneration in the subsequent decades. Birmingham came to be dominated by the service sector, and it became an international commercial center.